• A year ago today I was departing Vancouver, BC for Alaska to begin the best vacation of my life. http://bit.ly/ivglC4 #
• The iPad might be spoiling me. I just tried to tap on a URL in a paper magazine. #
• A handy article on how to delete your Facebook account. They don’t make it easy, but you can do it if you know how. http://rww.to/pUJWlg #

At long last, I’ve posted the photos from my trip to Alaska. For those of you who don’t know, I spent a week travelling by cruise ship from Vancouver, BC to Seward, AK followed by a week on land ending up in Fairbanks, AK. Some of our stops included Ketchikan, Juneau, Hoonah, Skagway, Hubbard Glacier, Anchorage, Talkeetna, Denali National Park and Ruth Glacier. We also spent Canada Day in vancouver prior to leaving and spent one day in Seattle, WA on the way home.

I took over 4,700 photos. Of those, I kept 1,300. About 600 are posted on my website. Click here to view them. I hope you enjoy looking at them a much as I enjoyed taking them!

• Embracing my Irish side by seeing “The Irish & How They Got That Way” at the Kimmel Center. Skipping V-Day and going right to St Patrick’s! #
• The show (The Irish and How They Got That Way) was really good. Fast paced & entertaining whether you’re Irish or not! http://bit.ly/cjs3Mp #
• That Ted Turner cooks up one tender bison filet. #
• Came home from Atlantic City with slightly more than I went with. What a unique occurrence. #
• RT @NBCOlympics: “After 2nd Olympic gold, Shaun White’s new goal-get new nickname: http://nbco.ly/bjR8Xw" – Flying Tomato was much catchier. #
• RT @rozsavage: “Americans born after 2000 have a 1 in 3 chance of early onset diabetes. Minority groups? 1 in 2 chance. How scary is that?” #

The medals being presented at the Vancouver Winter Games have the distinction of being “first” in several ways. It’s the first time they aren’t flat. These medals are of an undulating design. Basically, that means they look wrinkled. Personally, I’m still not sure if i like that feature or not.

They also are the first medals that aren’t all the same. Each medal is etched with a randomly cropped portion of a piece of Canadian First Nation artwork representing orca whales.

However, the part that most caught my attention is the fact that the Vancouver medals have technology in them, but not in the way that you think. They don’t have chips in them. They actually have old technology items in them! Some of the metal used to mint the medals came from recycled e-waste. E-waste is a huge problem. I deal with it at work and at home. Old computer equipment and electronics build up at an astounding rate. I know that recycling a small amount of gold, silver and copper and reusing it in Olympic medals isn’t exactly going to solve the problem, but it’s nice to see an opportunity to better publicize the issue. I’m just sorry that I haven’t seen more about this in the media coverage or even on the VANOC website.

You can read more about this on Bloomberg. You can also take a look at all of the past Olympic medals at the IOC site.

I’m finally catching up tonight on watching all the Olympic events that are recorded on my DVR. Some of the things I’m watching are the downhill which featured some spectacular crashes that hurt just watching them. Then I watched the snowboard half-pipe finals where the American women seem to keep crashing.

After watching these athletes work through injuries and wondering how they persevere, I then read about this German luger who broke a tooth biting his silver medal. I guess it takes a special kind of guy to hurtle down an ice track at 90 mph on a tiny sled. The type of special guy that would chomp into a hunk of medal.

It always seems that my blog gets more use when the Olympics are going on. Ironically, I’m very much not a sports fan except maybe for watching the Phillies. However, I’ve always enjoyed watching the Olympics, especially the Winter Games. I think it’s a combination of the fact that you get to see sports that you don’t see very often (many of which aren’t team sports that I find boring) and the fact that for a few weeks people from various countries actually get together and participate in something just for fun without political posturing and other such silliness.

So, get ready to see more blog entries over the next few weeks, and for the first time some tweets as well.